Friday, October 17, 2014

I planned on
watching The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Carmen, being broadcast at
movie houses next month, but now I’m worried. Will watching it make me start
smoking?

The Western
Australia Opera Company believes so. It has banned performances of Carmen
because the opera is set in and around a cigarette factory in Seville, Spain. The characters in the opera smoke cigarettes.

The head of the
opera company said she is concerned about the health and well-being of the
performers, stage hands and others. However, she also said the performers would
not have been smoking real cigarettes.

Opera: Tempting Our Morals?

The real reason
for not staging the opera is money. Fear of losing it. Carmen was banned after
the opera company signed a sponsorship contract with a government health
agency. The contract is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and the agency
believes that depictions of smoking are not a good thing.

It is not known
what opera will be staged in place of Carmen. The choices are limited
if the opera company and the health agency sponsor are concerned about guarding
the morals of audiences.

Surely they will
have to ban Macbeth because it promotes murder. Madam Butterfly is out because
its heroine commits suicide. La Traviata and The Merry Widow shouldn’t be staged
because they surely would persuade people to drink alcohol. And, what about
Rigoletto in which the leacherous duke’s kidnapping of a young lady leads
to murder?

I think I'll skip Carmen at the movie theatre and see one of those Terminator movies
instead.(My Minden Times weekly column is at: http://mindentimes.ca/?p=5441.ca)

Monday, October 6, 2014

Postmedia’s purchase of Sun Media’s English
language newspapers is the best news the Canadian news industry has had in the
last two to three decades.

Back in the late 80s and early 90s the
Canadian newspaper industry suffered the appearance of newspaper owners and
operators who had no business being in the game. They were bad for the
business, people who did not understand, or refused to accept, the traditional
principles and practices of newspapering.

What followed were years of turmoil,
downsizing and diminishment of good journalism. Editors, who for the most part
were dedicated to doing a public good, were told what to do and how to do it by
newcomers interested only in boosting profits.

Postmedia has emerged from the turmoil as a
company with solid business sense, plus a dedication to building new platforms
on which to deliver good journalism. Sun Media was a good idea when it was
formed by a group of intrepid journalists. Then it was bought by Quebecor and since then has not done much to improve, or even
sustain, good journalism.

Postmedia has a strong core of journalism
leaders. Some of the best that I have ever known.

The company says it will operate the Sun
papers in major markets where it has competing newspapers. There will be some
public screaming about media monopolization, but ignore that. The bottom line
is that the Postmedia deal creates the possibility of better journalism in an
industry that has been struggling to find its way through the Information
Revolution.